Monologue: The AI Job Loss Con

of the media just quoting it advobating without thinking. Now, to be specific, he said that AI would wipe out half of all entry level white collar jobs and spike unemployment to ten to twenty percent in the next one to five years. It's always this fucking he always says like, oh, it's that one year, all that five years. I don't know, mate, how werem I meant to know? I'm just making shit up.

And this is the entire quote, by the way, the fundament of at least different news stories and an egregious line of shit. Now, to quote the excellent Allison Morrow of CNN, Amiday didn't cite any research or evidence to that fifty percent estimate, and she added that Ammaday is a salesman and it's in his interest to make his product appear to be inevitable and so powerful it's scary, and that little of what Ammaday told Axios was new, but it was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to

draw attention to anthropics work. I've said it once and I'll say it again. Alison Morrow may be one of the best living business reporters. Everyone should be taking notes from her. She is the best. She was on the price Gouging, she's been on AI. She's really incredible. I'm saying this because Allison's been on the show and she rocks. She'll be back, and also because I'm pretty critical of the media and I need to give credit where it's

due now. In the same week, Oxford Economics put out a report about how entry level workers were facing a job crisis and vaguely mentioned in the preview of the report that there are signs that entry level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence and higher rates, causing Axios to run an article claiming that they're was now hard evidence that AI was driving job loss. I should also add Kevin Rouse, you know, the marketing intern that also

runs a New York Times column. He just quoted that adverbatum like that. That's the exact quote he used in a story in the New York Times. Didn't even bother opening the fucking thing. Now. One might think, anyway that the report would have like, I don't know hard evidence based on what Axio said, and you'd be wrong. On the very first page, it says that there are signs that entry level positions are being displaced by official intelligence

at higher rates. On page three, it claims that the higher adoption rates by information companies, along with the sheer employment declines in some roles since twenty twenty two, suggested some displacement effect from AI, and digging deeper, the largest displacement seems to be entry level jobs normally filled by recent graduates, and that is the whole argument that some roles that could maybe be automated with generative AI have

seen declines and employment and so called information companies have been adopting AA at supposed and undisclosed rates, meaning that AI has taken these jobs. Did these companies actually replace workers with AI who knows no need to bother checking that or whether one can actually replace any of these roles with AI. Boast the report done, sold, go home, smoke a cigarette. You did it, Champ, You put out your fucking report, even if the report's bullshit. Actually the

rest of the report's pretty good. It's just this weird bit. I'm pretty sure they just did four pr They knew that people would just go, oh my god, nurs Oh my goodness. AI is taking the jobs. I must cover that, except the people doing it on old people. They're people. I'm thirty nine years old, they're my age, maybe a little older, maybe a little younger. It's fucking terrifying. And like, while are absolutely some jobs being taken by AI, there is to this point little or no research that suggested

that it's happening at scale. And I must be clear that I don't want this to happen. I'm just saying, tell the fucking truth. The easiest way to prove me wrong, by the way, would be to find an actual company that's done it. Show me a company that has actually replaced full employees with generative AI. Show me the job that the AI is doing and how it is doing it, and then the output that it creates do not bring me a goddamn call center. I swear to Christ They've

been trying to automate those since they invented them. They've already been doing automation before large language models. If anyone actually looked into anything in technology, they would know the companies have been doing this already. It makes me feel insane, and you can't show me this because it isn't fucking happening, and I'm sick of people pretending it is. These articles do not serve the public. They do not inform the public.

They are propaganda for companies like open Ai, Anthropic, and Microsoft to pretend that their software does more than it can now or ever will, so that they can continue raising billions of dollars or raising their market caps. The media refuses to dig too deep because doing so would move against the will of the markets and their editors, or worse still, they just don't care enough to check

whether what they're saying is true. It's the same insincere, craven bullshit we saw with the metaverse, with Crypto, with the return to office Demands of twenty one and twenty twenty two, with Quiet Quitting with companies price gouging and blaming it on inflation. Reporters are far too willing to follow exactly what they think the world wants to read, rather than actually sharing the truth or learning anything themselves. And my next episode is going to be a three

parter about why I think this keeps happening. Our economy is dominated by people that are fully disconnected from the world around them, that buy things and sell things for other people that are disconnected to I call them business idiots, and they're everywhere, and I can't wait to tell you all about the next week. They turn my bloody stomach, but I love you listeners, and you're gonna love this